Japan Top Court Grants Retrial for Life-Sentenced Man after Death

Tokyo, Feb. 25 (Jiji Press)–Japan’s Supreme Court upheld Tuesday lower court decisions to grant a retrial for a man who was given a life term over a 1984 murder-robbery in Shiga Prefecture, western Japan, and died in prison later. The top court’s Second Petty Bench rejected an appeal filed by prosecutors against a second retrial request from bereaved relatives of the man, Hiromu Sakahara. Sakahara died of illness in March 2011 at age 75 while serving his sentence over the case, in which a woman in the Shiga town of Hino, who ran a liquor shop, was murdered and robbed of a safe. This is believed to be the first time in postwar Japan that a retrial has been granted for a deceased person for whom a life term or more severe sentence was finalized. All three justices of the Second Petty Bench agreed to grant a retrial. Justice Mamoru Miura, a former public prosecutor, did not participate in related deliberations. Sakahara is highly likely to be acquitted in a retrial, which will be held at Otsu District Court in the Shiga capital of Otsu. He was arrested and indicted in 1988. Sakahara pleaded not guilty during his trial, but Otsu District Court sentenced him to life in prison in 1995. His sentence was finalized in 2000, as Osaka High Court and the Supreme Court dismissed his appeals. After court procedures for the first retrial request were terminated in March 2011, following the death of Sakahara, his relatives made the second request in March 2012. This was approved by Otsu District Court in July 2018, more than six years later. Due to repeated appeals by the prosecution, the latest Supreme Court decision to reopen the case came more than seven years after the district court approval. The government plans to submit a bill to revise the criminal procedure law to the current parliamentary session. With the amendment likely to retain a provision allowing the prosecution to file appeals against retrial requests, however, the long time taken to grant the retrial in the Shiga case is expected to affect related parliamentary deliberations. Sakahara was said to have confessed during investigations by law enforcement that he committed the crime, before consistently claiming his innocence during the trial. There was no direct physical evidence in the case, and at issue therefore was the credibility of his confession. During court procedures on the second retrial request, the prosecution presented new evidence, including negatives of photos taken during the investigations. In its 2018 decision to grant the retrial, Otsu District Court said that the confession contradicted objective evidence and lacked credibility. Osaka High Court upheld the decision in February 2023, stating that there was room for questioning whether the investigations were conducted appropriately, including the possibility of the confession not being given voluntarily. Since the end of World War II, retrials have been granted in at least 20 murder cases in Japan, including the Shiga case. In 2024, Iwao Hakamata, 89, who was sentenced to death for the murder of four members of a family in Shizuoka Prefecture, central Japan, in 1966, was found not guilty in a retrial. In another case, Shoshi Maekawa, 60, was acquitted in 2025 over the 1986 murder of junior high school girl in Fukui Prefecture, also central Japan, after serving a prison sentence. END [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]